Space Babies » rants

AT&T hates customers

joost — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:43:58 +0000

In my series “corporations are amoral” here is a new installment. It’s all over teh interwebs that an AT&T customer emailed the AT&T CEO and was “thanked” by …. legal action! Wow, great customer relations there! Woohoo!

Contrast this to Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, who actually responds to email when you send one.

I heart git

joost — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:56:33 +0000

You only appreciate fast version control when you’re on a slow link. Thank you Linus for creating git, I would have gone insane without it today!

PS – posts about RailsWayCon2010 presentations coming up!

Apple pulls sexual content from iTunes

joost — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:44:52 +0000

Apple, as puritan as any US company, has pulled all sexual apps from the iTunes store after “complaints”. Mysteriously, all the violent games remain. A MacRumors reader put it very succinctly:

So boobs are bad, but murdering cops is ok. Got it.

Mind you, these apps are all rated for 18+. So you have to wonder how these complaints even are possible. If you are a concerned parent pull the rating-switch on your child’s iPhone!

Nederlandse Spoorwegen makes customers hate them

joost — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:53:01 +0000

Strong words? Yes, indeed. Though I have the SMTP-headers to prove the fact that NS (Dutch Railways) actively hates their customers and wants to annoy them as much as possible. Case in point: e-mail newsletter.

When I registered with them (compulsary to receive a discount card. topic for another rant) I had to leave my e-mail address to “verify who I am”. Well, whatever. I registered and made sure to uncheck all the “sell my private information to advertisers” and “bother me with newsletters” boxes.

Yet what is happening? I keep receiving their stupid newsletters. What is worse, they have made it impossible to unsubscribe. Here is what I have tried:

click the unsubcribe link

Actually it’s not an unsubscribe link. The link leads to their general customer service page, after which I should login manually and navigate through their system to find the unsubscribe box. Bad! Give me a perishable token in the email for a one-click unsubscription.

uncheck the newsletter box

No shit Sherlock. I had this one unchecked of course. Un-checked it again just to make sure. Had no effect, I still keep getting email from them.

reply to the email

My opinion is: if you send out newsletters, make sure people can reply. Otherwise you are just shouting with your hands over your ears. In other words when you disallow responses through the very medium you are using, you are abusive and anti social. Yet this is what Nederlandse Spoorwegen is. A reply leads to an Undeliverable Message.

adhere to internet protocol

Even if you don’t care about your customer, when you are on the Internet you must follow the internet protocols. The bounce message from the last paragraph was sent from postmaster@ns.nl. But when I send mail to that address, the message bounces as well! This is a huge no-no and it makes them spammers by every definition out there. Having a valid postmaster address is specifically mandatory per RFC.

file a complaint

So I went to www.ns.nl and looked around to see where I could leave a complaint. Turns out I can’t!!! I can only call them, via a paid 0900 number which means I have to pay them to get my email address of their spam lists! Maybe it’s just me but I find this kind of behaviour absurd. Fucking idiots. I hate them.

result: spamklacht

Luckily the Dutch government has forbidden spamming and has opened www.spamklacht.nl. I am unsure if my little submission has any effect, but at least it’s something I can do.

Unrelated: food

joost — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:17:51 +0000

With a newborn in the house, it starts to become quite clear that many of the food we eat is in fact not very healthy. Case in point: breakfast cereals.

In the morning, it takes too long to fill Ingmar with bread. So instead we prepare a bowl of cereal. Not corn flakes, but grains with warm milk. It is almost impossible to buy these products without sugar. It’s sad, really. All the “Bambix” brand products contain either plain sugar, dextrose (sugar) or honey (sugar). When you look real hard you might find one that has merely apples (fructose – sugar). Why do they do this? It tastes better? Sure does — for adults. To be sure, an eight month old will prefer it as well, but that is not the point. I would rather have him get used to unsugared food.

I have never been able to really express why though, it was more a gut feeling. This page does express my concern really well. We have all become to used to flavourful food, that we have ceased to notice the improvement in taste. So to our senses it tastes equal to unflavoured stuff. Yet we keep consuming all the calories that go with those kinds of food.

Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure—an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed “vegetable” in our society. These artificial products, and others like them, form the core of the American diet.

And don’t get me started on organic food. The basic premise is sound and my wife and I do subscribe to this movement. But there is one huge problem and that is taste. At the bonafide organic supermarket there are simply too many products that taste filthy. This can range from gag-inducing ’sweets’ to horrific tofu and even baby meals in a jar that taste absolutely revolting. They do sell breakfast cereals without sugar though. The problem: it’s also gluten-free. All of it. This means no wheat but instead gross grains that basically smell and taste like cardboard.

In my opinion this is quite a troublesome situation, but seemingly there is not a whole lot I can do about it. Except teaching my son to eat his whole-grain bread more quickly I guess.

File uploads in Ruby on Rails

joost — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:26:51 +0000

When you need to resort to using Flash to handle something, you know you’re in a mess. Yet that is the case when dealing with file uploads. For some inane reason (omg it’s haaarrrrrrrrd) file uploads in browsers are teh SUCK. So it falls to us, web developers, to deal with that shit in a sane manner.

And when I say sane, I really mean holy fuck are you kidding me with this crazytalk? The best solution for file uploads is to use Flash, the most broken of all browser plugins, and patch the fuck around its shortcomings. That’s just sad, people. It makes Jesus cry and all that stuff.
Luckily here is a good post explaining the procedure. Yes, we need to write a custom piece of middleware because Flash is retarded. Yes, also a mimetype plugin because flash is retarded. But it’s worth it, really. I think.
Sigh. Sometimes my work is no fun at all.
Dave Hyatt, please start building an awesome browser-based file uploader. Pretty please?

Sony wants YOU to pirate District 9

joost — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:02:48 +0000

You heard it here first: Sony TriStar (the movie distributor) wants you to illegaly download their latest film: District 9. Why? Because there are two months between first release in USA and release in Europe.

District 9 is the most anticipated sf/action film in recent years. Produced by Peter Jackson it deals documentary-style with alients visiting earth. It has already been released in the US but in Europe we are supposed to wait until freakin’ October. So consider this. One: sf fans know their way around bittorrent. Two: sf fans in Europe want to see this film now. Three: they are being denied this by the distributor. Four: they will download it illegaly since they must see it. Five: no profit!
Stupid TriStar!

PHP massive security FAIL

joost — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:34:14 +0000

A security vulnerability was discovered in Wordpress 2.8.3 recently. If you look at the flaw in question, I can’t believe people are still using PHP to publish websites. If you still do, you should be beaten with a stick. Let’s gloat about why Ruby (on Rails) is better, point by point.

Tom Ritter has posted an excellent analysis of the flaw. To me, it seems PHP is mostly to blame with it’s insane global namespace and perverse functions that take any kind of input.
If you think about it anyone still using PHP should be shot, really. With this insight I can probably write a bot to take down a PHP site in ten minutes or so. So here we go:
1. $key (which is a variable) gets created from URL parameters. This has always been the Achilles Heel of PHP. I am assuming register_globals is off, so they are creating this variable somewhere else. Baaaaaaddd. In Rails you would use params to fetch the URL parameter and then pass the value around in your methods.
2. value is filtered using preg_replace which also takes an array. Barf! Why on earth? I know! Because it’s convenient. Convenience trumps security every time with PHP. In Ruby this could not happen because there is no global preg_replace function. You would call gsub on a String.
3. wpdb-prepare happily accepts an array with an empty string for a string value. Major fail here. Because Wordpress has to mimic proper prepared statements, they are using nonsecure PHP code instead of robust database-level code. In other words, array with empty string again becomes empty string instead of blowing up and raising an exception.
4. Only at this stage does any kind of logic fault come into play. The Wordpress developers store the admin user without a user_activation_key apparently, because they didn’t foresee this problem. Still a PHP fault in my opinion, since automated integration testing is impossible.

I ~~hate~~ love to say it: using Ruby on Rails would have prevented this flaw at every step of the way. So would other sanely designed programming languages.

As web developers we all think IE6 is bad. I think PHP is the IE6 of web development “languages” (term used extremely loosely).

Ai! Amsterdam

joost — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:02:40 +0000

As an Amsterdammer, and soon to be living-in-the-center-of-Amsterdammer, a trend of our city’s municipality worries me. This is the trend to make Amsterdam squeeky clean, disallow anything fun, noisy and dirty and turn this old town into an amusement park. This is why I endorse Ai! Amsterdam which aims to change some of the absurd local laws recently passed. i.e. a law forbidding anyone to consume a beverage while standing up. (Yes! Actually true!) If Amsterdam is dear to you, please visit the site and register. I don’t want to live in Disneyland!

Macbook Pro doesn't work with Time Capsule

joost — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:46:09 +0000

Time for a vague problem. Yesterday I splurged on a new MacBook Pro 15 inch. But I had huge problems getting it to connect to my wireless network at home. And I am not the only one. Turns out it is incompatible with Time Capsule’s default setting! Argh!

If you leave the Time Capsule in its default setting (802.11n with b/g compatible) I can’t connect. When I change it to be 802.11n/a compatible, I have zero problems. Dang, and my iPhone will only connect to b and g! Seriously screwed here.

Also, I wonder if I should set the Time Capsule only to 802.11n. But then I don’t know what to choose, 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. What’s the difference? (besides the modulation)